A different France
DRAGUIGNAN, France — It is D-Day up in Normandy, but down here people are watching their coin purses, not their TVs, trying hard to hold onto a beloved way of life they see slipping away.
At Carrefour, a graying gentleman in one of those flat caps favored by Frenchmen of a certain age poked among a mountain of avocados as carefully as if selecting a fiftieth anniversary diamond.
“These are only 45 centimes (63 cents),” his freshly coiffed wife said. “Do you think we can afford a third?”
This hardly approaches the price paid by 9,000 men buried at Omaha Beach, whose sacrifice helped defeat what French President Nicolas Sarkozy called “one of worst barbarisms of all times.” (Click here to read about what U.S. President Barack Obama said on Saturday, which was the 65th anniversary of D-Day.)
And in most of Europe, social safety nets and reserves of wealth still keep food on most people’s plates.
But still.
Edwin Ferbach, 44, runs a fruit stand near Draguignan, a little Provence city, and works for Feeling Transport to deliver stuff that people buy online. Both businesses are suffering.
A worker these days might take home $1,700 a month and pay $1,000 in rent, he said. That limits options.
“Go to the St. Tropez market when it closes and watch people paw in the garbage for vegetables they can’t afford to buy,” Ferbach told me. Actually, any market will do.
Clearly, it is not just France. In most industrialized countries, as in the poorer ones, a gap is widening between those who have and those who haven’t got a chance.
For “Out of Poverty,” the latest issue of dispatches quarterly, I probed the slums of Calcutta and New Delhi. But I found a different sort of desperation in Youngstown, Ohio.
Steel plants closed in the 1970s and secure jobs suddenly vanished, as is happening in so many places today. If you are not born into poverty, it takes some getting used to.
A nun at Mother Teresa’s Calcutta mission put it simply: “If you are materially poor, that is only a lack of things. If somebody is spiritually poor, no medicine can heal them.”
When wealth surrounds you, and you have neither a belief system nor an extended family network to help you, the result is misery.
For the French, who emerged free but destitute from World War II, hard times are a painful reversal of fortune.
With help from the Marshall Plan and the hard-nosed national pride of Charles de Gaulle, the French resumed their old self-appointed global role as arbiters of civilization.
At home, strong unions established a social contract with industry and the government: job security, health care and pensions, long vacations, the works.
And, of course, eating well was as much a human right as an art form. The stylish reveled in a dejeuner sur l’herbe. Others, as in that old Cartier-Bresson photo, plopped down in their underwear to pour wine into glasses and gnaw on Bresse chicken.
But the world is different now, and so is France.
D-Day celebrations were eclipsed by the last day of campaigning for the European Parliament. Each year, France’s distinct flavors dissolve yet more into a continental stockpot.
Border-straddling companies bring labor practices from America — and the crisis. Suddenly, unions used to striking to protect their rights fear coming back to locked doors.
When factories are forced to cut back, workers hold bosses hostage and rail against “greedy rich stockholders.”
For outsiders, it is hard to take sides.
You have to love a country where workers can shut down transportation and cash machines for a week to widespread sympathy from people who see that the next fight might be theirs.
And that greedy stockholders thing gives pause. What about people who own a tiny fraction of a company as part of their dwindling retirement account?
So far, all bets are still out. There is a lot of France left to lose, and no one is giving up easily.
Robert Dantcikian, the butcher with the bedside manner, still hustles around his tiny shop in Draguignan as women trade their pension checks for fine Sisteron lamb.
On D-Day morning, Dantcikian’s place was jammed solid. He wasn’t much interested in Normandy. Like most Frenchmen, he was still deeply grateful. But that was 65 years ago, and now many of his customers are Germans with holiday homes nearby.
But, one by one, shoppers placed meager orders, asking for thinner slices of ham and pondering before ordering an extra veal chop.
“So far, so good,” Robert told me. “But this is a different France.”
Mort Rosenblum, editor of the quarterly dispatches, was senior foreign correspondent for the Associated Press from 1981 to 2004. He is a former editor of the International Herald Tribune. His 13 books include "Escaping Plato’s Cave" and "Who Stole the News?" He lives in France.
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